Covid-19 never met a cliché it couldn’t infect
The spiked-globetrotting-bully-ball-of-coronavirus codenamed Covid-19 has never met a cliché it couldn’t infect. Like a crotch-spritzing hand sanitizer station, it respects no borders, in these uncertain, strange, funny, difficult and unprecedented-but-not-really, times.
We’re all in a rolling Level 5 Second Wave firebreak lockdown now. You went outside on Sunday afternoon for more than an hour of strenuous pulmonary exercise flagrantly using that dribbling suck-hole in your face, you little micro-cluster, you. As a result of this wilful act of civic recklessness, you’ve got to quarantine for longer than a Wuhan wet market pangolin stretching its scales on an Auckland dock.
When your PUP’d colleague Tadhg got Covid-19, his wife Esmée thanked the stars because now he’d recovered, his antibodies would protect him. Esmée’s still doing the weekly queue-round-the-block grocery-shop. Tadhg is getting breathless on his round-trip commute from the couch to the fridge. He’s convinced he’s got Long Covid. Esmée’s hoping it’s not a long marriage. Plus ça change, Esmée.
Your boss Sandra is self-isolating, from her husband, from her children and now, from her own business. She’s taking the hit for the team, people. Food trays left outside her bedroom door are snatched within and licked clean. Her children press their ears to the wood and hear only unladylike mastication and the familiar TV-hourly ho-hum two-note dah-dum. Next week, Sandra will be self-isolating from herself. She may never be seen again. Bye Sandra.
There is no personal equipment to protect you from Coronavirus gobbling up platitudes and regurgitating them, like a feverish member of the Twitterati without decent WIFI access to an imagination: Hey I’ve been socially distanced for years – I’m a writer!
Onanistic Owen is self-tampering with himself on staff Zoom calls again. He’s got the bare-ass cheek to issue managerial edicts while his bare-ass cheeks curve seamlessly (no not seamlessly, of course Owen’s capacious ass has a seam) into his ergonomic office chair. You can see both of his hands but one of them may be an appropriated rubber Hallowe’en decoration and the rhythmic rocking cannot entirely be put down to a wonky caster. Masturbation in meetings is of course to be expected but RemoteWorkingDreadYear2020 makes everything just too damn literal and close to home, because it’s in your home. Everything is in your home. Everything.
If you test positive and you’ve been sitting next to someone on a bus, plane or train, you can consider them a close contact but only if you shared anecdotes about each other’s childhoods or a large bag of wine-gums.
Contact tracing is a hard thing to do (without shutting down a school). It’s also a hard thing to say in live interviews without subliminally thinking of unemployment and blurting out contract tracing or even contract chasing which is pointless now anyway, even – or especially – if you’ve got work experience at the West Wing. Contract Trace case-point: the Observer’s Carole Calwaddalr published the Cambridge Analytica contracts with the 2016 Trump campaign and nobody blinked. No résumé will now get you that job in Wendy’s. There are no Wendy’s. I’m from Louth. I don’t even know what a Wendy’s is. Slow it right down people. Enunciate. Don’t Expectorate. Contact. Tracing. I have no idea what you just said anyway – you were wearing a mask.
Trisha’s joking she finished the internet while advancing on you wearing her face-mask as a chin-cushion – hey Trish, I don’t care if it looks like an old bra cup clamped to your face, peeking your button nose over the top is about as useful in containing that hack-cough as wearing boxer shorts up to your balls. (Trisha’s pre-op, it’s 2020: Assumptions, make an ass of U and, eh, Mptions.)
In March, we were clapping for the key workers and cheering first responders. We were making moon-eyes at competent national leaders expertly governing in faraway lands and falling hard for lucid epidemiologists. We were transfixed with R rates and flattened curves and L-shaped recoveries. By November, we were obsessing over John King’s eloquent hands and ceaseless speech stamina bringing the sexy back to election stats. Now pre-Christmas pandemic fatigue’s been given the double whammy inoculation it so sorely needed: a Biden/Harris democracy reboot and Pfizer’s new vaccine that’s more arousing than an Advil-Viagra shake by dint of the secret sauce ingredient – the hope of a cure.
So stop with the Covid clichés, already, in this, the winter of our discontent.
As the last one-term US President once said: Read my lips.
Oh, sorry, of course…you can’t.
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